Thursday, April 19, 2012

Say what? Yes, our state's lawmakers have been receiving an annual Australian kangaroo harvest report, but someone they'll have to soldier on without it:

California lawmakers won't be briefed any longer on kangaroo harvests in Australia under a plan to scrap more than 700 reports required by state law that GovernorJerry Brown unveiled on Tuesday.

Australia's annual kangaroo harvest report, which California's Department of Fish and Game is required to track and provide to lawmakers, is one of 718 "unnecessary bureaucratic" reports discovered in audits of state agencies and departments ordered by Brown in December, according to a statement from his office....

"It wastes a lot of time and money to write, track and file these reports," Brown said. "Government should be focused on providing information that is actually helpful to taxpayers, not on checking boxes to meet outdated bureaucratic requirements."

So all these years they've been telling us there's nothing left to cut in the state budget we've been paying for kangaroo reports. And you just know this is only a tiny piece of the bureaucratic nonsense that goes on up in Sacramento with all the commissions and special organizations mandated by law that were created to pay off some political supporter. Dump it all and start over.

Isn't there a hotline state government employees can call to blow the whistle on government waste? Spread a rumor in one department that another department ratted out their cash-cow project and watch them call the hotline to retaliate. If we could feed off their bitter envy, we could get government to turn on itself.